A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  At that moment, though, I also understood that I did not have to accept everything. I could leave. And it was true that the words of the Englishwoman had stung. What if she was right, and by staying here I was actually endangering Ahlam? I should go. I had to go. I began packing my bags, throwing things into them untidily.

  “Please,” I said, handing Rana the keys to the apartment. She often talked about her wish to live alone, which she couldn’t afford on her schoolteacher’s salary, the equivalent of two hundred US dollars a month. “I’m going to go away for a few days. Not long. I’m just not sure I am doing any good here…Maybe I can do more from outside. If you want to stay at the apartment, you can. The rent is paid.”

  An hour later I left by taxi for Beirut.

  Chapter 20

  AHLAM’S STORY

  PART TWO

  THE GUARDS AT DOUMA Prison were not allowed to search the women. Since the rape of two teenaged runaways, for which the guard responsible spent six months in solitary, the only person with keys to the women’s cell was the chief warden, who looked on as the girl who would be Ahlam’s cellmate was ordered to pat her down.

  The black steel door slammed shut behind them. The key turned in the lock. How strange, in a cell measuring not more than four by four metres, for Ahlam to find herself with a green-eyed brown-haired beauty with a pierced lip and a stud in her tongue.

  The girl, whose name was Leila, watched with interest as Ahlam took in the tiny bathroom to the left of the door, the metal shelf along the back wall piled with thin blankets, the noisy fan near the ceiling behind which the faintest strains of daylight could be seen. Under the stark glare of fluorescents, Ahlam surveyed the army of cockroaches scuttling fearlessly across the walls. “Don’t bother yourself about them,” Leila said nonchalantly. “We have a peace agreement.”

  Ahlam immediately signed on to the agreement. At mealtimes the two of them laid down a line of crumbs on the far side of the cell so they would not be disturbed. The treaty was honoured unless the cockroaches broke it by climbing over their faces while they slept.

  “What’s your story?” Leila asked, sitting next to Ahlam on the whitewashed floor. She was dressed in the silky black pajamas she had been wearing continuously since the night of her arrest four months ago. The pajamas, now somewhat the worse for wear, had at least been new when she was arrested.

  Ahlam told her that she had been taken from her children for working for journalists and humanitarian groups, and had been interrogated over the course of a month. “What do you think will happen to me?” she asked. Though only twenty, Leila was the old hand.

  “You need to talk to a lawyer,” Leila said.

  “Where am I going to find a lawyer?”

  “In the next cell.”

  Along the back wall of the cell stretched a heating pipe. Leila got up and went to the far corner, crouching down beside it. “I’ll speak to him,” she said. With her mouth close to the pipe, she spoke into it. “Where is the lawyer?” she said. “I want to talk to him.”

  There was a scramble of male voices, then a man asking what she needed.

  “There’s an Iraqi lady here,” Leila said into the pipe. “She spent a whole month in solitary, in an isolation cell. She has two children, a girl and a boy, and no one’s taking care of them. We’re wondering how to get her released.”

  “Tell him my interrogation is finished,” Ahlam said.

  After the last interrogation session, before she was moved, she had been given a questionnaire to fill out.

  Where are the American forces in Iraq? it asked.

  Did they think she was a leader of the American forces?

  She took the pen and wrote her answer: I don’t know.

  Where are the militias in Iraq?

  Her answer: I don’t know.

  She figured this meant they had finished with her and she would shortly be released.

  Ahlam could hear the man’s voice through the pipe and she felt her heart compress as she took in his words. “Even if the interrogation is finished,” he said, “I suspect she’s going to be here for at least four months.”

  —

  On the white washed walls of the cell, where past prisoners had marked their names or longings, Ahlam scratched out two hearts and inside them wrote “Abdullah” and “Roqayah.” But she found she couldn’t stand to look at their names—her heart began to race with worry—so she rubbed them out with her hands.

  Her eldest son did not need a heart; he was in her heart. In her cell she did something she had rarely allowed herself to do. She wept for him.

  The days quickly developed a pattern. Waking at dawn, signalled by the distant strains of a mosque through the one small opening at the top of the cell where the fan rattled loudly. Hurriedly washing and filling plastic bottles under the meagre pipe in the stall-sized washroom which at least, unlike her cell in solitary, had its own squat toilet. The water pipe shut off at noon, and being summer, it was hot, so she and Leila took turns rinsing off in the morning and, when the water came back on at night, once again before bed. There was no soap or shampoo, no way to eradicate the sweat and grime and itch of the lice that plagued them, and no change of clothing, so after they had showered they put their stinking garments back on.

  It was the conviction of the guards that women could not be criminals—women could be stupid but not wicked—and it was their fear that the women prisoners would pray to God to curse them. So they tried to curry favour with the women and thus with God. After midnight, when the warden had gone home, they slid open the metal slat on the cell door. Through the slat they shared whatever they had: food their wives had packed, newspapers, cigarettes, information, even (though it was forbidden) a copy of the Koran. Most of the guards were Druze or Alawite—Abu Yusuf was Christian—but in the main they were ordinary folk. What they feared most was punishment, which is why they had treated Ahlam so rudely in isolation, having been ordered to have no contact with her.

  At first they spoke only to Leila, the longest serving prisoner, and the most beautiful. When they ascertained that Ahlam had serious charges against her and could not have been planted there to spy on them for Syrian intelligence, they began to talk to her. And, not surprisingly, in Ahlam they found a confidante. It had always been this way, people talked to her. They confessed their sorrows and secrets: the negligent wife who would no longer sleep with them, the lazy good-for-nothing son, various adventures with girlfriends.

  Sadiq, who had guarded her in the isolation cell, was one of the guards for the women here, too, but he distinguished himself. He always had a book with him, so at night Ahlam and Leila stood by the eye-level slat and listened as he read to them. While reading from Babylonian history he served them Arabic coffee—strong and black, an unfathomable luxury, more delicious than any coffee they had ever tasted. Fearful of leaving any sign that he had allowed the women to smoke (for which he would receive an automatic six-month sentence, the same as for rape), he held a cigarette to their lips through the slat.

  He told them he had worked in the prison for twenty years. He told them stories: one about a prison in the desert of Palmyra with a dozen floors below ground that no one knew about until the prisoners—those still alive—were released in 2000 after Bashar al-Assad came to power. “Thank God you don’t live in Bashar’s father’s time,” he said to Ahlam, speaking of the Syrian president’s fearsome predecessor. “He would just have put a bullet in your head.”

  Ahlam and Leila passed the hours talking. Leila told her of the nightclubs where she used to go. “We’d go to Beirut. We went to drink, smoke hash, and returned to Damascus the next day. We just wanted to be wild.” She knew all the top DJs, all the best clubs, had partied across Lebanon and Jordan. Playing with the stud in her tongue, or pacing the cell—a panther in its cage—she spoke about her past. How she had been raped as a little girl by a shopkeeper, how her father refused to press charges. How her parents, both doctors, fought all the time. Leila was fluent in Eng
lish, having been taught by them. After their bitter divorce her father married a woman who had only one arm; the other she had lost in a car accident. By this time her father was injecting himself with morphine he stole from the hospital where he worked, and her stepmother treated her as the family slave, awakening her at five in the morning to clean, run errands and serve them until midnight. At thirteen, she ran away to her mother’s house but nobody watched over her and her only contact with her father was through the bank machine: whenever she needed money she could take whatever she wanted. By fourteen, she was drinking, hanging out with a group of wild teenagers in Damascus. Then she discovered cocaine and her fiancé, who was now in another sector of the prison.

  —

  One evening the warden unlocked the door to the cell. “Get ready,” he barked, as Ahlam was handcuffed and blindfolded. “They’re going to interrogate you.”

  She was brought to the familiar room three doors down, where Abu Yusuf was waiting for her. She had not been here in several days, but she remembered his voice very well. He beat her with the stick and reminded her that she was a traitor. Then abruptly he stopped. The door opened and someone was brought in.

  “Don’t say a word,” Abu Yusuf ordered her. “If he hears you, we’re going to beat him.”

  Behind her a confused voice was asking why he had been handcuffed and blindfolded, why had they arrested him, why had they brought him here—what had he done? She knew that voice, and knew her brother’s cologne.

  Chapter 21

  BEIRUT

  “SO WHAT BRINGS YOU back to Beirut?” the Emperor asked, rising from behind his desk to kiss me on alternate cheeks. It was close to midnight at MusicHall—the middle of the Emperor’s workday, and the end of a very long day for me. I had showered and changed at the hotel room. The giant bouncer at the end of the red carpet leading up to the club had pointed me to the private office behind the coat check.

  It was quiet in the office but for the pounding of music in the packed cabaret, where the winter before I had watched red velvet curtains part on a young man who brought the house down with Edith Piaf’s anthem regretting nothing. I wished I shared that sentiment. But I needed to talk to the most connected man in Lebanon.

  “I had some…trouble in Damascus,” I explained, sliding into a chair in front of his desk. MusicHall was Beirut’s version of Rick’s Café in Casablanca, though Michel Elefteriades, the Greek-Lebanese impresario who styled himself as “Emperor Michel I of Nowheristan,” looked less like Humphrey Bogart and more like the leader of a Gypsy caravan spliced with Che Guevara. I’d interviewed him in the winter, thinking that at some point I would write about this place. I hadn’t done so, but the two of us had become friends.

  Twirling his sceptre, his cape draped on the back of his chair, he looked pleased to see me, a change from my morning’s debacle at the UNHCR office in Douma. Unlike the Englishwoman who had wanted me gone, the Emperor liked having journalists around, passing on rumours or coming to him to confirm them, mixing with the British or French or Spanish ambassadors who paid him homage in his back office, along with politicians, UN officials, spies, and aspiring singers hoping to be discovered. He’d become famous as a judge on the Arab version of the televised singing contest The X Factor, but at heart he was a political operator. To him, politics was just another form of theatre.

  “Why did you call me from the border?” he asked. “What was the urgency?”

  Crossing from Syria into Lebanon had been a problem, but not for the reason I had feared. When I arrived at the customs wicket and presented my passport, the Lebanese border guard had looked from me to his computer screen, from the screen to me. “You,” he said, “made a mistake.” When I’d misplaced my passport in the winter, I had reported it missing to Lebanese intelligence. Having recovered it immediately afterward, and having had a plane to catch, I had neglected to inform them that the case was closed. Their computer, however, had not forgotten. At least he used that lovely word—mistake—which implied not guilt but incompetence, and could see from my passport photo that I was me.

  “Just go back to Damascus,” he had said. “We can resolve this in a few days.”

  “I couldn’t go back there,” I told the Emperor. I couldn’t face the prospect. In Damascus lay confusion, uncertainty, fear, loss, and the distinct possibility that my presence there was doing Ahlam more harm than good. I had to get to Beirut and find some perspective. Even the air along the border smelled fresher, carrying on it the promise of the Mediterranean. The sky seemed higher, less oppressive. Taking out my phone I had called the Emperor, who called someone he knew, and after two hours the border guard waved me through. The officer in charge of the crossing had somehow got the idea that I was booked to perform at MusicHall that night. I realized his misconception when he asked me what instrument I played. “Electric guitar,” I said after a moment’s pause, fervently hoping someone wouldn’t drag a Stratocaster out of a backroom and demand a recital while I protested that the acoustics weren’t quite right. Fortunately that did not happen. But they had confiscated my passport—they said I could pick it up at the General Security headquarters in Beirut.

  “You were in Syria again,” the Emperor said. “With your people, the refugees?” Through the walls I could hear a woman’s voice belting out “Unchain My Heart.” Customers would be dancing in the aisles by now, waiters uncorking champagne.

  “Yes.” I explained the broad outlines of Ahlam’s arrest. “The charges against her—providing weapons to militias, running a human trafficking operation—it’s all bullshit. It has to be. Maybe they’re upset because she was talking to reporters, working for journalists, even when they’d told her to stop.” I was coming around to Hamid’s interpretation—that this was somehow about her work as a fixer, though exactly how wasn’t clear to me. Hamid thought the arrest was meant to send a signal to other Iraqis who worked with journalists and to the refugees for whom she was a prominent figure, to keep them in line.

  The Emperor tugged on his goatee, thinking. A waiter entered, bringing me a glass of Riesling on a tray. The Emperor was drinking Red Bull. He liked to be sober when nobody else was because his drug of choice was information.

  “Have you spoken to—?” He reeled off a list of names, most of whom I had already contacted.

  “I’m planning to go to the UNHCR here,” I said. “And Human Rights Watch. She worked for them both.”

  Through the walls came thunderous applause. The singer would be taking her bow. “She’s one of my new discoveries,” the Emperor said, smiling.

  “How long do you think they will hold Ahlam?” I persisted.

  “A few months. Three, four. If they are sending a message they will want to make it stick. Then, when she comes out, she will know to do as she’s told. And because of the gravity of the charges against her, she won’t be able to talk about what happened.”

  It made sense. The charges were serious, the sort that you’d accuse people of if you want to ensure they will say nothing later on—if they are ever released. In an atmosphere of distrust, ludicrous allegations were all too easy to believe. Had she simply been accused of working for media, or being too bold in advocating for refugees, it would look like political repression. But not this way. This way, the victim became the guilty party, responsible for her own fate.

  The Emperor offered to talk to people he knew. He held out a hand laden with silver rings.

  “Anything. Thank you,” I said, taking his hand.

  —

  To be without a passport is to lose your freedom. Until I could get it back I was in bureaucratic limbo. And getting it back was not as easy as I had been led to expect. I had thought I would stay in Beirut for three or four days, maybe a week—just long enough to catch my breath—but I had not counted on having it confiscated, or the runaround that would ensue.

  “Oh, they can hold your passport for months,” an American journalist I met in Beirut told me. We were sitting in a rooftop restaurant above H
amra Street, watching the camera crew that had commandeered the street below. Beirut is never more Beirut than after a conflict: less than two months ago there had been fighting here between Sunni militiamen—said to be supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, which hoped to divide the region between Sunni and Shia spheres, isolating Iran and Syria—and Lebanese Shia Hezbollah.34 Some of the Sunni fighters were said to be Salafi jihadists who had earned their stripes in Iraq, but they were handily beaten. The Lebanese army had remained on the sidelines to avoid a civil war, and with each street that was captured, the fighters from Hezbollah handed the army control. Five minutes after the ceasefire, café owners were busy moving chairs out onto terraces. The large plate-glass window in the women’s shoe shop next to my hotel still had a bullet hole, but otherwise all evidence of the fighting had been cleaned up as if it never happened. Tonight the crew was filming a music video—under strong lights, a young man with a bouquet of roses ran after a girl in a red dress.

  “Months?” I said, incredulous. “You think it could take months?”

  Having felt trapped in Damascus, I had somehow, in my attempted escape, landed in another trap. Every time I went to the General Security headquarters in downtown Beirut, handing over my phone, passing through a metal detector, descending into the cement holding pen in the basement, I waited two or three hours until an officer told me to come back again in a few days when the matter would be sorted. I knew I should probably offer to pay a “fee,” but no one had offered the opportunity.

  It was disturbing to be back inside the prison of this vast intelligence complex, silently watching an officer clean his gun or question a poor Ethiopian runaway maid until her employer showed up in his business suit to claim her, all the while knowing that Ahlam was in a prison somewhere like this in Damascus—only worse, because she would be locked in one of the cells, and I feared what her interrogations were like. Was she being beaten? Was she being tortured?